Cinematographer's 50-year-old photos bring a bygone Labrador back to life
CBC
A treasure trove of decades-old film slides of life in Labrador has residents of the region revisiting memories of times gone by.
Mary Ann Snow and Joy Turnbull Green grew up in the small Labrador town of Charlottetown in the 1970s. The two sisters would go to the store across the harbour with and hang out with other kids as their mother used the one phone inside.
Clear photographs of that time in the isolated community are few and far between, Snow said, but the two sisters were recently sent a link to pictures from the '70s that were posted online in the Facebook group Our Bigland.
"It was fantastic. I never knew the photo existed. To see myself and my sister and brother in this photo was very exciting," said Snow, who was nine in the image from 1971 and now lives in Harbour Grace, in Newfoundland. "I couldn't believe it."
The picture shows the girls looking at the camera with a gaggle of other children gathered around a large, old, yellow Ski-Doo. The two sisters have matching red jackets their mother had ordered from an Eaton's catalogue.
"I also thought it was fantastic," said Turnbull Green, who was seven in the picture and now lives in Wabush, Labrador. "I thought, 'Man, I'm cute.' Or I should say I was cute back then."
The pictures come from a cinematographer who travelled through the region, filming for CBC, from 1968 to 1987. While travelling, Douglas Pike used his own camera to take stills. Those slides were in storage until Pike started going through this year, showing life in the isolated areas that was rarely captured on film.
"I didn't have a lot of time to photograph stills when I was traveling," Pike said. "But occasionally I did go and get stuck in a place which was really nice, and it gave me the opportunity to go around and shoot a lot of stills."
His travels included Red Bay, Hebron, Charlottetown, Port Hope, Simpson, Makkovik and Hopedale. Pike remembers the photograph of the kids fondly as well as another image of a woman wearing a blue scarf taken in Nain.
"[I] met phenomenal people in all these places," Pike said. "Her face and her image to me is timeless. She represents the beauty, the innocence, the lines of hard work, toughness, nature, the environment it's in her, in her face, in her eyes."
After scanning only a few, his scanner broke down. Pike said it's a time-consuming procedure but now that he knows there's a demand for them he hopes to resume scanning the slides soon.
Pike said with a laugh he also isn't sure what may be on them.
"It's like anything. When you shoot something 40 years ago, you don't always remember what you photographed, but it'll give me pleasure to go back in and look at them and scan them."
Snow said reliving small moments through the images has made her think about how much has happened and how much has been accomplished by the people in the Ski-Doo picture, she said.
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